


Olly Olly Oxen Free

by beer_good



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Episode: s05e01 Buffy vs Dracula, Gen, Hide and Seek, Memory Alteration, Parallel Universes, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-13
Updated: 2018-10-13
Packaged: 2019-08-01 16:27:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16287950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beer_good/pseuds/beer_good
Summary: Dawn knows most of her memories aren't real. But she'd still like to know exactlywhenthey became real. Isn't it weird that the monks just plonked her right into reality with memories so vivid that she honestly can't tell where they end and her real life began? How did that work, exactly?





	Olly Olly Oxen Free

**Title:** Olly Olly Oxen Free  
**Author:** Beer Good   
**Fandom:** Buffy, season 5/post-series  
**Rating:** PG13  
**Word count:** ~700  
**Summary:** Dawn knows most of her memories aren't real. But she'd still like to know exactly _when_ they became real. Isn't it weird that the monks just plonked her right into reality with memories so vivid that she honestly can't tell where they end and her real life began? How did that work, exactly? 

 

_Go then, there are other worlds than these._  
\- Jake Chambers, _The Dark Tower_

**Olly Olly Oxen Free**

Buffy says Dawn's just looking for an excuse to have two birthdays, which, hey, what would be wrong with that? Besides, Buffy has, like, three at this point. Dawn knows most of her memories (well, until her 28th birthday or so) aren't real. It's something she's learned to live with. It's probably not even the weirdest thing that's ever happened to her. Still, sometimes she wonders just where the line is between fake and real. Exactly _when_ she was, uh, born. 

_But Dawn sucks at hide-and-seek. Always did._  
_She has, like, two or three places she hides,_  
_and she only thinks that works because I used to pretend I couldn't find her._  
_Guess what, I'm not pretending anymore._

Nobody remembers everything that's happened to them, life would be weird if you did, but she doesn't really remember anything _more_ of being 14 than she does of being 13. At some point that summer, her memories became real, but there was no point where she stepped through a door and everything became Technicolor. For the most part, until the whole mess with Glory and Mom and all that, that summer was sort of unremarkable. Just... happy. One of those perfect summers right on the edge of growing up, with room for both silly games of hide-and-seek and going to the beach with Buffy's friends like she was a real person and not just a kid. 

_And took all of her clothes with her? All of her diaries? Her posters, Giles?!?_

She's got to hand it to the monks; they know a lot about what it's like to be a girl growing up in California with a superhero for a sister. (And a disturbing amount about boy bands.)

_I AM being rational. This is Sunnydale. There's no such thing as irrational._

She's asked Buffy, of course. And Willow and Xander. Buffy doesn't like to have serious conversations about it; it's one thing to rationally _know_ you have 14 years of false memories, another to want to poke around in it too much. One night in Rome over a bottle of wine Buffy says she thinks it _may_ have been around the time Dracula showed up, "reality always gets kinda wobbly around that guy". That scans; as far as Dawn recalls, that was a few weeks before the first time some crazy person told her she didn't belong. Still a bit vague, though. Willow eventually gives Dawn a blunt "no" to her not-that-subtle hints that there had to be a spell that could figure it out; too many variables, too many memories she doesn't want to risk unravelling, and it's not like knowing would change anything, right Dawnie? Xander tells her a story about that time he was babysitting her a couple of years earlier and they watched a scary movie and she laughed at all the bits he had nightmares about, and then tells her that as far as he's concerned, he likes that that happened. 

_They go over the floorboards with a microscope, with spells, with a crowbar._  
_They tear the room apart, then the whole house._  
_They search every vamp nest, crypt and sewer in Sunnydale._  
_They do every locating spell in the book._  
_They call in favours from demons, witches and lower beings._  
_Nothing. Gone._

Dawn knows she was born sometime during the summer she turned 14, the summer when Buffy was happy and home from college, their last summer with Mom. She just popped into existence fully formed, with a lifetime of prefab memories she knows are fake but would like to keep anyway. That's going to be have to be good enough, she figures. As subjective constructs go, life is pretty good. 

 

 

 

_In another Sunnydale,  
t_ _he Buffy who'd grown up with a kid sister,_  
_who one day hid under a bed and just disappeared,_  
_eventually stopped looking for her._  
_After her mother died, she sold the house._  
_There was always some apocalypse to keep her busy._  
_But for years, she would still flinch and look twice at every other teenage girl,_  
_as if the sister she'd lost wouldn't have grown older._


End file.
